Tuesday, February 04, 2014

Death
Metal Underground

Newsletter
1/27-2/3

Because
Metal Is Art

For their performance at the Grammy awards, Metallica paired up with
Chinese pianist Lang Lang for a performance of their dramatic protest
song “One” originally from …And Justice for All.

According to VH1, the bond was formed in just 45 minutes of practice
time the day before the performance. As you can see below, the result
was smoothly integrated despite this lack of extensive practice.

At the Gates have announced their reformation as part of the
2013-inspired wave that saw Gorguts and Carcass return. Unlike the
2009-wave of returning bands, like Asphyx and Beherit, this
retro-underground-revival has featured classic bands “modernizing” their
sound. It also generally exhibits bands who had already cast aside
their metal roots for musical reasons. Where the previous wave was more a
sense of bands returning to pick up where they left off, the new wave
seems to be about bands participating in the new metal scene and trying
to siphon off some of that interest, newsworthiness and cash flow.

On April 11th, in York, UK, a new conference will attempt to tackle
the heady subject of “Metal and Marginalisation: Gender, Race, Class and
Other Implications for Hard Rock and Metal.” Sponsored by the Centre
for Women’s Studies at the University of York, the conference aims to
explore these traditional academic concepts in the context of the newer
forms of metal.

When too many utterly mindless and pandering bands pile up in the
review queue, even life seems washed out and hopeless. At that point,
even death metal has lost its power and mystique. When that happens, I
throw on Demilich Nespithe and my faith in the genre is restored. This
album presents such a creative and yet meaningful interpretation of
death metal that it restores faith in a lot more than the genre.

Today, Jeff Hanneman would have been fifty years old. The man who
helped invent the sound that underlies all of underground death metal
did not, as the people around him in the LA suburbs tend to do, waste
his life away in repetition. Instead, he forged his own path and we
celebrate him for it and the results of it.

Metal is not a job and will never pay the bills. Hence many metal
musicians move on to other careers. Sometimes this includes other forms
of music. Such is the case of Lorin Ashton, a/k/a Bassnectar, who
previously was in a black/doom metal band called Pale Existence.

Correctly intuiting that metal would not pay the bills, and being from
the already-undernoticed San Jose scene which got obscured by the
greater prominence of nearby San Francisco, Ashton migrated from
underground metal to playing multiple DJ sets a day in an effort to
develop his hybrid style.

The crossover between metal and keyboard music is vast and
well-documented to the point that the well-dressed death metal site
simply ignores instrumentation and picks the keyboard bands that sound
as evil and nihilistic as death metal. Whether that’s works by Neptune
Towers, Beherit, Jaaportit, Goatcraft, Burzum or Danzig, evil metal has
crossed over to occult keyboards.

Another entry into this world is Khand, made by lifelong metalhead and now synthesizer jockey Arillius.

Imagine you’ve returned to those magic years between 1985 and 1987.
Thrash exploded, followed by speed metal and then the nascent
proto-death/black bands are emerging. Almost everything is tinged with
Metallica since they are looking like the first band of this ilk to make
it out of the underground and into mainstream record stores.

Pentagram (CL) comes to us from those formative years but with two
different versions of that time. The first is the second disc in the
set, which re-records seven classic tracks using modern production and
instrumental know-how. The second is the “first” disc in this set, which
is thirteen new songs. While both derive from the fertile era of the
middle 1980s, they each take different approaches, with the first disc
actually showing more of what this band can do.

For some time we have delved into academia and its treatment of heavy
metal. Today however we take another course, which is to look at the
technology of heavy metal and its implications for both society and
technology.

Aiding us in this quest is Dr. Brian Kirkmeyer, who teaches “Metal on
Metal: Engineering and Globalization in Heavy Metal Music” at Miami
University in Oxford, OH. He was good enough to gift us with some of
this time explaining the class and his approach to the study of heavy
metal.

At a time when most crosshairs were aimed at Tampa, FL or Sweden as
being “death metal capitals” some of us trained our sights further
afield to places like Canada and Brazil which to their credit were home
to a great number of pioneering bands. Headhunter D.C. are one such band
who built a fanbase in their homeland of Brazil but are generally not
known outside South America.

Many of those who are involved with music have spoken praise for the
1980s speed metal explosion, which offered a form of music with both
intensity and integrity. Until the great wave of commercialization, it
simply refused to join the social impulse to all get along and behave
like everyone else.

But a recent interview with Dominic West, who accompanied the UK’s
Prince Harry to the North Pole, confirms that speed metal may have more
going for it than simply being aloof to the great herding instinct. It
is the music not only of Royals, but of soldiers...

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